September 28, 2007

Greene for the Weekend

Three Graham Greene posts in a week. Even for me that's a little much. But this morning both Maud Newton and Ed Champion noted this article in the Independent, about the discovery of audio tapes of some never-before-heard Graham Greene radio interviews. In the broadcasts Greene discusses his time in Indochina, smoking opium, and is writing habits, and also reads from a work-in-progress which eventually became The Quiet American. The broadcasts will be released in the U.K. next week as a CD released by the British Library, part of a series that also includes audio tracks by Beckett, Shaw, Wells, and others. The article includes an exerpt from the interviews, featuring Greene discussing his novel Brighton Rock.

The article also mentions one of my favorite Greene anecdotes, which relates to when he was the editor for the short-lived magazine Night and Day. Greene wrote film reviews for the magazine, and in an article about Shirley Temple, who was nine, he went on and on about how she must actually be an adult midget and fully aware of the coquettish sexuality she puts across on screen. Well, he got sued by the movie studio for libel, and lost. He heard that he'd lost the case while traveling in Mexico and wrote to a friend "Apparently I've got to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple."